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Best Courses for Professionals

If you want to up your professional game, this course collection will do the trick. The courses will help you become more productive, less stressed and better at managing your time (and your team’s time) more efficiently.

25 courses

Courses in this collection:

1

Why People Fail

Four significant obstacles to success and how you can overcome them

Mastering failure is surely a vital step in achieving your aims, hopes, and dreams. After all, success is often just a moment—a goal fulfilled, soon to be replaced with new goals. But failure is the ambitious person’s constant companion, often dogging us for months, years, or even decades. We need to understand and conquer failure if we are ever to master success. You’d never know it from our education system. At school we’re taught geography, history, mathematical formulas, and obscure facts never to be used for the rest of our lives, yet how many of us, in all our years of formal learning, were ever taught how to overcome obstacles to any goal?

In this course, we explore four main causes of failure, in any field, and reveal solutions for overcoming them and creating a successful, happy life.

The most important message in this course is that failure leads to success. Even if you have experienced countless failures in your life, it doesn’t mean you are destined to have success pass you by.

This course, published in collaboration with Wiley, is based on the book Why People Fail: The 16 Obstacles to Success and How You Can Overcome Them by Siimon Reynolds

Did you know that 40% of new leaders fail within their first 18 months?

And, did you know that most leadership failures are completely avoidable?

In fact, every new leader is perfectly capable of inspiring people to achieve successes and improve performance beyond what they thought possible. Best of all, leadership excellence is easy if you recognize a few key leadership truths. In First-Time Leader, transformational leadership experts George Bradt and Gillian Davis tell you what you need to know to ensure that your first time at the helm makes—rather than breaks—your career.

Drawing on the insights of proven leaders from around the world, as well as from their own experience as leaders and consultants, the authors of First-Time Leader have distilled the most essential lessons on leadership into a coherent approach that can be applied anywhere. With the BRAVE leadership framework (Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, Environment), you’ll learn how to work your new role from every relevant angle, resulting in confident leadership that will inspire and enable your team.

This is a practical course aimed at first-time managers who are looking to build an effective and open team. If you are interested in courses that cite academic studies or rely solely on case-studies, this isn't the course for you. Instead, what you will get is a 100 percent practical course that focuses on actionable tools and exercises you can do with your team and with other managers.

The exercises will be useful in situations such as:

Giving and getting feedback from your team;

Workshops with your team or customers;

Ideation together with your team;

Meetings and learning with other managers.

The course touches on three central aspects of management and working with a team: creating engagement, giving and receiving feedback, and cooperation.

In our experience at Irrational Labs, we find that it’s the companies trying to help consumers become happier, healthier and wealthier that make the most mistakes valuing their products. This course will help you better understand these mistakes and how to avoid them.

Have you ever been curious about questions such as:

Why people get so excited about buying things that are in short supply?

What causes promotions to drive short-term spikes in sales yet become counterproductive over time?

When can offering a product for free actually be bad for the customer?

In 22 short and fun lessons, you will learn the answers to these questions as you are introduced to key concepts from the field of behavioral economics. You will get examples and exercises to help you take what you’ve learned and apply it to the pricing and promotions of different products and services.

This course is primarily for product managers, designers and creators of products and services that are helping improve people’s well-being.

If you choose to apply any of these insights within your company, we ask that you answer one question before making any changes: “Will this make people better off?’ This simple rule of thumb will help ensure you’re making changes that improve your customer’s bottom line as well as your company’s.

This is a short course of 13 lessons on how to develop from an OK speaker to a really, really great one. Created by Alf Rehn, who is a professor of management and a professional keynote speaker, it is created for those who wish to develop as professional speakers. Rather than going through the very basics of public speaking, it addresses what you need to do to stand out, and win over the hearts and minds of audiences. The course also delves into issues such as using humor in speaking, stagecraft, and other aspects of speech design, performance, and audience interaction.

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6

The Art of Keynoting

How to Go From a Decent Speaker to a Great One

This is a short course of 13 lessons on how to develop from an OK speaker to a really, really great one. Created by Alf Rehn, who is a professor of management and a professional keynote speaker, it is created for those who wish to develop as professional speakers. Rather than going through the very basics of public speaking, it addresses what you need to do to stand out, and win over the hearts and minds of audiences. The course also delves into issues such as using humor in speaking, stagecraft, and other aspects of speech design, performance, and audience interaction.

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7

Craft Your Job to Suit You Better

Job crafting: the secret to being engaged at work

Have you ever thought about how engaged you are at work?

If you haven’t, it’s about time you did. Research shows that when we’re engaged at work, we’re more likely to have better mental and physical health, act according to our values, feel physically energized and focused, have a positive attitude and feel like we are in control over events that affect our life.

So it’s not just in the interest a company to have engaged employees; it’s a win/win scenario, really.

Let’s start by admitting that, as employees, we’re not passive actors in our own work life. We care about our own well-being at work, because work is such a large part of our life.

In this course, we’ll dig into the secret ingredient of work engagement: job crafting.

Job crafting enables us to fit our jobs to our skills, our abilities and our knowledge, as well as our preferences and needs. It’s what keeps us engaged, creative and productive.

We’ll teach you the ins and outs of job crafting and how to turn the job you have into a job you want (and even like).

Service design offers an interdisciplinary approach to business innovation that combines different methods and tools from various disciplines. It’s not a new stand-alone academic discipline, but a new way of thinking.

This course is for people who want to understand and apply the concept of service design thinking when creating great services. If you are an account director, product manager, designer or marketer, you can enhance your ability to understand your customers and to positively shape their experiences. By adopting and developing a design thinking mindset, you will gain a competitive advantage over others in your field.

In 16 short, fun and information-packed lessons, you will get a brief introduction to the art and science of design thinking. The lessons in this course are distilled from rigid research findings in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, marketing, and management.

With over a third of the workforce feeling disengaged at work, boredom is a real threat if we're planning on living a fully engaged life. And in spite being glued to our smartphones in search for entertainment on the daily, boredom is still something most of us feel in our everyday life. That feeling might sneak in when we're spending time at yet another pointless staff meeting. Or when we're waiting for a friend. Or when we're waiting in the checkout line

This course will teach you all about what it means to be bored, how it differs from stress, what the long term consequences are and what harm boredom brings. We'll also discuss whether there are any upsides to boredom. Spoiler – there are.

If you often feel trapped in a boring state and want to know how to handle it, then this course is for you. We'll show you the benefits of being bored (according to research, of course) and how you can reap them.

In this course, I will show you how psychological theory can be applied to design. I won’t demand that you read every single study published. What I will show you are the benefits of taking a psychological approach, as well as how to advocate your design decisions based on sound psychological reasoning, making your designs – and the way you talk about them – better.

As an entrepreneur, consultant, freelancer or small business owner, you are more than likely to be forced to negotiate on a monthly basis. This might include:

Negotiating a contract with a customer;

Negotiating price with a supplier;

Negotiating about the level of commitment between you and a business partner.

Many people may not be aware of the multiple opportunities to negotiate on a daily basis. To some, this might sound like a hassle, and a bit scary. What this also means is that there are a lot of non-threatening situations where you can work on your negotiation skills.

This course will teach you the basic of negotiations, the must-know tools to succeed and give you a clear action list on what you should, and should not do when negotiating. We recommend this course to anyone running their own business, but the tools from the course will help you get better deals everywhere and make it easier for you to express what you want.

In 2012, Google’s People Analytics team embarked on what seemed to be an impossible mission: to find out the one ingredient that highly effective teams have in common.

They named this quest Project Aristotle, and turned to what Google does best in order to uncover the answer - they looked at the data. What Google found was that all top performing teams had one thing in common: a high degree of psychological safety.

In this course, we start from that finding and dig deeper into the latest research on what makes a safe work environment and how to foster one for your team. We’ll tell you what you need to know about psychological safety, from the symptoms of an unsafe team to the impact of that safety has on the bottom line.

Whether you’re a team manager or the member of a team, you’ll find out practical ways to make your team more effective and your time spent at work more enjoyable.

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What our users say:

"As a manager, you rarely have time for courses or to rethink how you run your team. This content in this format was really helpful and I love the fact that it focuses on ONE aspect instead of a handful."

There is an ever-increasing number of things that need to be done in an ever-decreasing amount of time. The calendar fills up with meetings. There is less time for strategic work and for doing the things we mean to accomplish between all those meetings…

If you think that the “rat race” is getting out of hand, and you want to take back control over your time, then this course is for you. With the help of some simple techniques, your days can become efficient and well-planned, leading to less stress and frustration for you.

The aim is that, after these ten lessons, you will have freed up time through better structure in your calendar and meetings. Time you can spend on the things you feel like you can’t keep up with today.

Meditation is my medicine. It makes me focused, present, happier and kinder to those around me. I’m sure the world would be a better place if more people meditated.

Meditation promises a lot, better sleep, more focus, better presence in the here and now. Many people who have tried it can attest that it does deliver. The path there isn’t necessarily a simple one, though. I’ve put together this course to make things a bit easier for newcomers to meditation. You will get 15 short exercises that you can do before or at work. It will take some effort on your part. But if you do all of the exercises, you will see positive effects on your ability to maintain focus and deal with stress.

Taking 15 minutes for meditation each day is a core point of this course. In each lesson you will be introduced to one simple meditation technique.

Just like people, some workplaces are fun while others are boring. The one thing that happy workplaces have in common is employees who are engaged in meaningful assignments. They are efficient, productive and enjoy the challenges that come with the job. Happiness at work leads to employees who are successful in their professions and proud of their employer.

With this course, I hope to put job satisfaction on the agenda of corporate life, and get managers and individual employees alike to stop and think about what they can do to bring joy to their job. You will learn about all the advantages of workplaces characterized by joy, as well as see what you, your employer and your coworkers can do to create such a workplace.

The advice and suggestions that will be presented are based on recent research as well as my own experiences as an organizational consultant.

Can’t stop opening your email? Do you have more than ten tabs open right now? Are you planning what to cook for dinner while reading this sentence?

If you have answered yes to any of the above, you just might have a problem with multitasking.

A problem? Yes, modern research offers clear evidence that multitasking is far from effective. In this course, you will learn why. You’ll also be given ten simple exercises that will help you stop multitasking and start monotasking.

This course builds on research from behavioral economics, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral psychology to get you on your way to a monotasking work-style.

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Said about the course:

"I love the concept of monotasking! It has changed how I work entirely – I get more done but somehow leave work earlier than before!!"

Human beings are prone to pay most attention to information that confirms, rather than goes against, their worldview. Because of this, most of us have a hard time predicting the future, doing non-biased research and evaluating choices in an objective way.

If you enjoy making predictions, or you work in a field that requires research and trend analysis, this course is for you. You will learn about some common cognitive biases and get a step-by-step guide on how to think and act in order to make more informed decisions and predictions.

Research in 2006 from leadership development firm BlessingWhite suggested that 73 percent of managers had some form of coaching training.

So far so good.

However, it seems it wasn’t very good coaching training. Only 23 percent of people being coached—yes, fewer than one in four—thought that the coaching had a significant impact on their performance or job satisfaction. Ten percent even suggested that the coaching they were getting was having a negative effect. (Can you imagine what it would be like going into those meetings? “I look forward to being more confused and less motivated after my coaching session with you.”)

Let’s face it - you’re probably not getting very effective coaching; and you’re probably not delivering very effective coaching either.

My guess is that there are at least three reasons why your first go at developing a coaching habit didn’t stick.

The first reason is that the coaching training you got was probably overly theoretical, too complicated, a little boring and divorced from the reality of your busy work life.

Even if the training was engaging—here’s reason number two—you likely didn’t spend much time figuring out how to translate the new insights into action so you’d do things differently. When you got back to the office, the status quo flexed its impressive muscles, got you in a headlock and soon had you doing things exactly the way you’d done them before.

The third reason is that the seemingly simple behavior change of giving a little less advice and asking a few more questions is surprisingly difficult. You’ve spent years delivering advice and getting promoted and praised for it. You’re seen to be “adding value” and you’ve the added bonus of staying in control of the situation

That’s no surprise, of course. When you take the premium that your organization places on answers and certainty, then blend in the increased sense of overwhelm and uncertainty and anxiety that many of us feel as our jobs and lives become more complex, and then realize that our brains are wired to have a strong preference for clarity and certainty,

The only problem is, it’s not working for you as well as you’d like. In fact, you’re probably stuck in one (or more) of these vicious circles: an overdependent team; a sense of overwhelm; and a disconnect from the work that really matters.

So let us help.

In this 10-bit course, we’re not trying to turn you into a coach. However, we do want you to be more coach-like so that you can work less hard and have more impact.

You will learn that there is life beyond the “here is what you should do” modus operandi.

You will learn how to tame the advice monster.

And you will discover four questions that will change the way you lead forever...

Enter your email and let’s get started. You’ll find the first lesson in your inbox right away, and you’ll learn more about those three vicious circles I mentioned above.___

Said about the course:

"I felt that Micheal provided a missing piece in my role as team leader. I'm more confident and know more about how to make people on my team grow"

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19

Hooked

How to Build Habit-Forming Products

This is the bite-sized version of the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. The course (as well as the book) is written for product managers, designers, marketers and startup founders. It is designed for people who want to keep users coming back to their products on their own, without expensive advertising and spammy messages.

This course will help you build behaviors rather than just building products.

Not sure if you need this course? Well, consider this:

23,000 products are launched in the US every year, of which 80 percent will fail.

92 percent of all startups fail within three years.

Less than one percent of apps in the App Store will be financially successful.

Sign up using the form below to get ten bite-sized and actionable lessons on how to create habit-forming services. The lessons will be delivered every weekday for two weeks. Most lessons include inspiring cases that show how real companies use the Hook Model.

The course is produced by the team at Daily Bits Of with the permission from Nir Eyal to use parts of his book and articles.

Said about the course:

"Applying psychology to product development seems to be the big thing these days but no one helps you do so better than Nir Eyal. Our entire team took this course at the same time which led to daily ideas and actions on how to improve our product"

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20

Facilitate a Co-Creative Workshop

How you can host a rewarding and useful co-creative workshop

You have probably been sitting there, at a brainstorming session. The facilitator throws her arms up in the air and says "here we go". But the energy is low.

You and your peers don't really understand why you were invited or even the purpose of this "brainstorming".

After the meeting, you leave feeling like those 2 hours were a waste of time. If you are the one facilitating the workshop, you'll wonder what went wrong? Why are people so bad at co-creation and brainstorming?

With this course you can stop all of that!

With this course you'll learn preparations and techniques that will:

give the participants and you as a facilitator a great workshop experience;

make people want to do more;

get people to be more creative together;

develop solutions and ideas that you can not anticipate in advance.

Sign up now and learn how to facilitate a workshop that participants will remember and enjoy!

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21

First Things First

Prioritize accurately and say no with a clear conscience

I have noticed that many find it difficult to prioritize.

We have our to-do list, we have a decent overview of all the things we need to do, and we empty our inboxes (both physical and metaphorical) on a regular basis, but what is the right thing to do next? And if something lands on my desk, does it mean that I have to deal with it right away rather than continue doing what I was working on?

This course is for you if you are ambitious, have the best intentions, say “yes” to others more than what might be good for you in the long-run, and then have to suffer the consequences of doing so. It is also for all of you who want to prioritize consciously and be able to accept or decline offers and requests without regrets. Prioritization is more a skill than a talent, and we can all do a handful of things to make it easier for ourselves to prioritize deliberately and accurately – not only do what might feel good and seem appropriate at the moment but what will be beneficial in the long-run as well.

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Said about the course:

"Enjoyed every single lesson, got time to try three of the exercises but looking to implement at least two more of them. Love David's system"

How can we know what affects the results of an organization? The answers are often to be found in behaviors within the work group. By identifying these behaviors and promoting them with the help of proven methods from OBM, we can streamline the organization and achieve great results!

In this course, we will introduce you to OBM (Organizational Behavior Management). After the course you will have a better understanding of how you can give yourself and your employees a chance to promote the group’s positive behaviors, and together create an organization where inspiration and results are key pillars within each unit.

In ten parts, we want to give you a taste of what you can achieve by using tried and tested methods within OBM. So, let me show you what efficient organizational management really looks like! Submit your email address below to get started!

This course is created by me, licensed psychologist Sara Ingvarsson. In my work, I help both small and large organizations bring about change that sticks.

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Said about the course:

"Thanks to Sara's course I finally got time to learn about OBM to see what all the fuzz is about. Now I know and thanks to that I've gotten a new perspective to behaviors within an organization."

***Over 6000 users are learning about the science of people from Vanessa's courses. It's easy and free to join them!***

Leaders think differently.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to shadow the CEO of a major technology company for one day. That one day changed my life forever. Walking through the hallways of his company, hearing him interact on phone calls and watching him tackle projects and challenges was like nothing I had ever seen before.

He was a human behavior hacker.

That day was the start of my fascination with people and the hidden forces that make us tick. Since then, I have studied hundreds of leaders like him looking for patterns. In this course, I will share nine findings and give you concrete actions you can take in order to think and act like a leader.

The course is free and it's delivered every day for two weeks straight to your inbox or to Messenger.

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Said about the course:

"I've learned more from these ten condensed lessons than I have from many bestselling business books"

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24

How to Beat Procrastination

Insights and tools from psychology that will help you get things done

Having a hard time getting started with work that needs to get done? Do you wait until the last moment before you start working? Procrastination, or consciously postponing what should be done today, is less about personal traits than it is about behavior. In the same way that you once learned to always deal with tasks at the last moment, you can learn to act differently. With the help of psychological insights about motivation, rewards, and distractions you can increase the probability of completing your tasks - on time.

In this course, you will receive practical tips on how to change your approach to learned behavioral patterns, as well as how to achieve your goals through a better structure, time management and problem-solving. Getting things done on time doesn’t have to be exhausting - things like coffee breaks, encouragement and friends are some pleasant ways of making your tasks easier to deal with.

This course is based on scientific studies by leading researchers in the fields of motivation, goal setting, and procrastination. You will be provided with exercises and principles of treatment from cognitive behavioral therapy within areas such as stress management and procrastination.

The creator of this course, Alexander Rozental, is a licensed psychologist and a researcher at University College London.

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Said about the course:

"The only thing you need to read about procrastination. So many insights, so many useable tools, such a great package!"

Since so much of our work related communication is done through emailing today, this vital tool can be the spine of good personal structure if properly used, but can also be the tuft that overturns an already heavy load if not used correctly.

There are no central and internationally established guidelines for how to properly email, but hasn’t some form of code of conduct developed over time?

Throughout this course I will identify some of the least common denominators in terms of how we email. The ambition is for these rules of thumb to ensure that the communication between us runs smoother and that our everyday lives filled with emails becomes at least a little bit easier.

I, who have created this course, am David Stiernholm and I am a struktör, which means that I on a daily basis help people, companies and organizations become more effective by creating better structure and becoming more organized. My services include talks, courses and individual sessions.